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Haystacks #3

In the 1890s, impressionist painter Claude Monet painted a series of works showing changes of natural light on fields of haystacks. By the time pop art emerged in the 1960s, these well-known paintings existed in the popular imagination as clichés. The dot pattern in Lichtenstein’s print alludes to Ben Day dots--- the basis of half-tone printing. Lichtenstein co-opted this technique, used to reproduce art historical tomes as well as the newspaper comics of mass culture, and archly implied that endlessly cloning works of art may popularize and, by extension, trivialize them.